How is Donald J. Trump Like the Coronavirus Pandemic?

 Learning from the stress-tests of 2020

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

I’m not especially nervous about the coronavirus. Don’t get me wrong: it’s dangerous. It’s lethal, at least for some. It exposes some fundamental weaknesses of our systems. It threatens my family and my friends. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.

I’m worried about it. I’m worried about it in the same sense that I want to make sure my life insurance is up to date, and the mortgage is paid, and all the fluids in my car are at the manufacturer’s recommended levels. It’s something that, if I don’t stay on top of it, might bring harm to me or to others.

But I’m not especially nervous about it. That’s because for about forty years I’ve been involved in the field of strategic studies. I’m aware of just how vulnerable we are, to so many things, and have been for longer than most people care to think about. I’m aware of so many things that could bring down this civilization, and of how little attention has been paid to so many of them by the people whose job it is to ready our response. I know that the situation could be far, far worse. I know that our public health officials have been anticipating that something like COVID-19 was on its way, even though they had no way to know exactly what form it might take, and they’ve taken the best precautions they have been allowed to by our political leadership.

When I watch the news today I think back to the morning of September 11th, 2001. My wife and I were watching TV as the second airliner flew into the World Trade Center. She turned to me and said, quietly,

“Well, you told them.”

For the rest of the world 9/11 might be “the day everything changed,” but for those of us with a working knowledge of the problem we’d been at war since 1979, and planning for this kind of attack for years. We’d done war games and other simulations. We’d prevented real attacks on more than one occasion. We knew that someday — someday — someone was going to get something like 9/11 done. And when it happened, we knew that it could have been worse.

(And no, don’t ask me how it could have been worse. I have no desire to give helpful tips to prospective terrorists.)

9/11 was a stress test. It took our system and pushed it towards a breaking point. It put American social and political institutions into a crisis, a condition when there is a perception of increased risk to what we value, surprise, and a limited time to respond. In conditions of low stress most people don’t perceive a problem. Nothing changes. Nothing is learned. In conditions of moderate stress some people are too overwhelmed to act, but some weigh the options provided by people who seem to have workable responses. Information is exchanged. Systems change, and adapt to the situation. We might, for example, improve cockpit security for aircraft, or infiltrate and monitor potential terrorist organizations. Appropriate lessons are drawn. In conditions of extremely high stress, people are too overwhelmed to react, or they react irrationally. Many follow the orders of the first person who seems to have a response, whether or not it makes sense. We might, for example, invade Iraq. Or force everyone to take off their shoes at airports.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a stress test. So is the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put our medical, social, economic, and political systems under stress. The medical and public health systems have, for the most part, shown themselves to be capable of handling the load up until now. They are locating the carriers, within the limits of available testing. The experts are informing the public about what is known, what is not known, and what can be done by individuals and institutions to slow the rate of transmission and minimize the risks of exposure. Research is progressing to identify modes of transmission and to find ways to treat the symptoms. Eventually there will be a vaccine, and perhaps a cure, and when these are found there will likely be mechanisms to get those medicines to the people who need them. At present, hospitals have not been swamped by cases. Whether they will continue to do so well depends on the number of cases that have yet to be expressed, and how quickly they arrive. That, in turn, depends on the social, economic, and political systems.

The social systems have, in many ways, worked better than expected. People have been seeking out reliable information. Individuals have been taking action, both appropriate (limiting social interactions, avoiding unnecessary travel, stockpiling some essential non-perishables) and not (toilet paper?). Voluntary groups have been adapting: schools have been cancelling classes, or putting them on-line, while churches have been telling parishioners to stay home. Businesses have been advising employees to work from home, when possible, and to avoid unnecessary travel. Some have been limiting operating hours, while others (not all, to be sure) have been trying to help their employees to cope with the unexpected financial crisis.

The economy is not dealing well with the pandemic. But the financial system has been on unsteady ground for well over a decade. The Obama administration worked to prop up financial institutions and provide needed capital to large businesses, while failing to punish the people and organizations that enabled the 2007 financial collapse to take place. In fact, many of those people profited from their acts. Employment has increased since 2008, as has the accumulation of wealth by the top one percent, but there has been no corresponding increase in wages. Legislative reforms were enacted to limit financial speculation by lenders and to impose artificial stress tests to identify problems before they arose in practice. In 2010, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in the US following the crisis to “promote the financial stability of the United States”. Internationally, the Basel III capital and liquidity standards were adopted by the central banks of countries around the globe. To protect the rights of American consumers, in 2010 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was established. But these innovations were systematically weakened between 2010 and 2017. In that time, the CFPB had moved from Special Advisor Elizabeth Warren to Acting Director Mick Mulvaney. Not all the necessary lessons were learned, and some which were learned were quickly forgotten.

For months, speculators have been waiting for a signal that it was time to grab profits and run from overvalued stock markets. The COVID-19 pandemic, followed immediately by the collapse of oil prices, have been taken as that signal, but they are not the cause. The problems with the global systems of finance and trade are structural. They existed well before the pandemic. And they have been encouraged by deeper problems in the global political systems.

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic has been a stress test, so has the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Like the pandemic, the deeper problems have been there for a long time. Trump is a trigger. Trump is a symptom. Trump is an indicator of the deeper problems. He has made things worse, but he is not the cause.

It’s easy to condemn Donald Trump. He’s an ass. He’s a buffoon. He’s a narcissist. He’s a racist and a narcissist a mysoginist and a friend to dictators. Whether or not he is in the service of some foreign master (a question that has yet to be settled), his actions have weakened American alliances, served American enemies, and threatened what many people consider to be the core values of American democracy.

And that’s ok — if we learn from it.

There’s no such thing as a perfect institution. Values and assumptions need to be challenged, once in a while. We need to rethink what we stand for, and what we stand against, and why. Much like the recession of 2007 highlighted the need for “stress testing” to avoid the collapse of our banks and our financial institutions, Trump and his enablers are providing a stress test for the American Republic. Rather than simply condemning him, we should learn from this experience. Fix our mistakes. Build stronger institutions. Reaffirm what we stand for.

Often, nothing is as educational as a bad example. Trump and Trumpism are, above all else, a bad example. Even his supporters — those with some measure of character — admit that as a person the president is not a “stable genius.” They accept that he is a deeply flawed individual, morally and cognitively, and many only voted for him because they believed the alternative was worse. They resented being ignored, being described as “deplorables” or told they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” These voters wanted to shake things up. They wanted to break out of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton cycle of establishment politicians trading chairs and reaping profits while the ship of state sank. Many of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 did it for the same reasons they voted for Obama in 2008. They wanted hope. They wanted change. And, to some extent, they got it from Trump. Change, at least.

The Trump years have been a stress test for American democracy. They have demonstrated how many of our problems are the result of individual shortcomings, and how much is due to the structure itself. On the individual side, in addition to Trump himself, we have people like Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader of the Senate, self-declared “Grim Reaper” of bills from the House of Representatives, a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court, and testimony in the impeachment trial of Trump. But it’s not just Republicans. There are plenty of Democrats deserving of personal condemnation.

In any case, the important point is to learn from our mistakes. The people and the professional partisans need to develop a common understanding of where our weaknesses lie and what are some of the things that need to be reformed. People and parties need to be removed from power. Ideas need to be reconsidered. Institutions need to change. It’s encouraging that there are now more Americans who identify as “independent” than as a member of either of the two entrenched political parties.

The challenge to political institutions is more than just Trump. It’s more than just the United States, too. Some politicians still don’t get it. Joe Biden, for example, tells us the problem is “Trump,” and if he is removed from power we will return to a government of bipartisan consensus, negotiating over how best to achieve our common good. He’s wrong. Doesn’t he remember his own experiences under Obama? And the impeachment, where a partisan Senate fell into step to block a real trial and keep in office a man who had clearly violated his oath of office, is evidence that the problems we face are more than can be blamed on one noxious personality. The obstruction of justice, backed by the appointment of a partisan Attorney General and the replacement of judges and career civil servants with people selected on the basis of their partisan loyalties over demonstrated competence, underlines just how important the norms of service to the Constitution have been, and how easily they can be subverted by people who don’t share them.

Some simply to blame capitalism. Bernie Sanders, for example, has consistently positioned himself as a “democratic socialist” who considers capitalism itself to be contrary to the principles of freedom, and argues that if the levers of political and economic power are given to the “right” people, they will work together to achieve our common good. He’s also wrong. He’s wrong in his criticism because the economy we have today has little to do with the free, fair, and open markets proposed and fought for by Adam Smith. We have never lived under that kind of capitalism because true capitalism is about open competition under a set of open, transparent, unbiased rules supported by cooperation to maintain the rule of law. Real capitalism might work, but it would be messy, and we can’t do it with the current electoral system. We need a government strong enough to enforce the rules, professional enough to do it without parisanship, and open enough to popular opinion to not fall into the hands of a billionare class.

With the current first-past-the-post electoral system, the system of rewards leads to nothing better than a an ineffective system of two parties, each seeking the means to make permanent its own rule. The trend may be more obvious for the Republicans now, because demographic trends mean they have to work harder and break more laws to keep themselves in power. But the reward structure affects Democrats, too. And as more economic power resides in the state — either by military spending or public welfare — the pressure grows to be (in fact, if not in name) a one-party state. Neither capitalism or socialism requires democracy.

To the extent money is treated as “speech” it subverts the voices of the citizens of the Republic. Money is not speech: money is a bullhorn. And while money can’t buy an election (see Bloomberg), it can drown out alternatives. The treatment of money as speech, as taken to its apotheosis in Citizen’s United and McCutcheon means the death of representative democracy. It took a Civil War to overturn the Dred Scott decision. Let’s hope it doesn’t take anything like that to reverse our more recent mistakes. But until these decisions are reversed, there is a structural problem lying at the heart of the Republic.

A related problem was one anticipated by the anti-federalists, and their proposed solution remains open for ratification as an amendment to the US Constitution. Although the first ten amendments are now known as the “Bill of Rights,” there were in fact twelve amendments proposed. The first two were rejected, largely because they blocked the personal power and privileges of the legislators themselves. The second proposal was finally ratified by the states in 1992, and is now known as the 27th Amendment:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened

In other words, if Congress votes itself a pay raise, all of the members of the House (and one-third of the Senate) must face reelection before that raise will go into effect. If members of the Congress are seen as getting too greedy, they can be voted out of office before they get their raise.

The first proposal, now commonly known as the “Congressional Apportionment Amendment” remains open for ratification. Its effect on the structure of the government of the United States would be profound. The operative clause that applies once it becomes law is

there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

Today the House of Representatives is capped by law at 430 Representatives. Under the new/old rule, given the current population of the United States, the House of Representatives would have more than six thousand!

Consider some of the consequences. As the number of Congressional districts increases, the size of each district — in land area and in population — declines. Each citizen finds it easier to contact and influence his Congressperson, and easier to run for Federal office herself. It is more difficult for a very wealthy person (or organization) to buy a sufficient number of elections to affect policy (especially if there are also limits to corporate and PAC spending). We would be closer to the ideal of one person-one vote. As the number of members of the Electoral College is related to the size of the House plus the Senate, even if the College can’t be abolished its results would be far more likely to reflect the popular vote. There would be no repeat of the presidential elections of 2000 and 2016.

The current number of Representatives is set by an Act of Congress, and with each census the members of the House grow farther apart from their supposed constituents. Given that most citizen’s votes would be worth more after the ratification of the proposed amendment, in terms of their proportional weight in the selection of Representatives, there would be more reason for citizens to get involved in local issues and elections.

To be sure, a 6500 member House would present difficulties for administration and negotiation, but today’s technology would make it easier to operate than it was to run the legislature when Congress had to always meet face-to-face and the transportation of people and information was limited to the speed of a horse. It would also open up more opportunities for private negotiations between members, more subcommittees, and more specialization by members on issues of importance to themselves and their constituents. Loyalties to constituents would be more influential than loyalties to Parties. Finally, as staff would grow to work with the larger, decentralized, body they would also be more available to monitor and influence the enormous bureaucratic apparatus of the Executive Branch. The Legislative Branch would have the resources it needs to better balance the Executive, and less need to make fundraising more important policy and constitutent service.

Maybe we should thank Trump. His stress test identifies real problems, and forces us to consider needs that would otherwise be ignored. His years in office are highlighting flaws in the American financial system, the electoral system, and the structure of American government. Maybe we should thank him for the unintentioned gift of his bad example — but I won’t.

Like COVID-19, the Trump presidency is a stress test. It’s unpleasant. It’s dangerous. It’s potentially deadly. But what’s important is what we learn from it and what we do about it. If we withdraw, we learn nothing. If we are stampeded, we may institutionalize changes that make things worse. But if we take this as an opportunity — to raise awareness, to mobilize emotion, to consider options, and to make useful changes — these are tragedies we can learn from. These are opportunities to do better. To be better. To be ready to better anticipate and deal with whatever is the next disaster to come along.

Voting Rights: A Modest Proposal

You don’t have the right to vote. Should you?

 

Americans like to talk in the language of rights: the right to life, the right to self-defense, the right to privacy. Some of these things are spelled out in the Constitution. Some of them are not. They are considered human rights: they come from our nature as human beings.

Voting is not a human right. Voting is a civic right.

A civic right comes from being a member of a political community. If you want to vote in America, you need to be recognized as an American. In particular, you have to be recognized as a real American.But who decides who is a real American? What is the rule one applies to determine if someone is American? These are the questions, usually unspoken, that lie behind many of the debates in contemporary politics. If you want to “Make America Great Again” you probably have a different idea of what an American looks like than someone who is an activist for the voting rights of the poor, the foreign-born, the non-Christian, or the non-White. This doesn’t mean that a MAGA voter, or a Trump supporter, is racist, or a misanthrope, or a xenophobe. He is, however, more likely than other voters to be a nationalist. He is more concerned about election fraud. He is more likely to believe things as they are today are “pretty good,” or “as good as they can be.” He is more likely to think that things were better twenty years ago, or fifty years ago.

There’s a reason, beyond simple self-interest, why the Republican Party is more associated with legislation for voter ID, or to keep felons who served their time off the voter registration rolls, or to make the lines longer at polling stations in districts that are predominantly poor or non-White. They have a more restrictive idea of what it means to be an American.

America, they tell us, is a “nation-state.” It has a “culture,” and not everyone living here is a member of that culture. And there’s some truth to that. For a political community to function there have to be some kind of common understanding and expectations. Cultures, including political cultures, are hard to define, but clearly they differ from place to place, and they can change over time. In some places, corruption is expected. In others, it is virtually nonexistent. In some places, it is expected that the dictator will rule through violence and fear. People will disappear, never to be seen again, and no one expects the perpetrator will be brought to justice. You may not like it — you may hate it — but things are what they are, what they have always been, what they will always be. Cultural differences show up in tourism, in transnational trade, and in international relations. It’s a thousand little things. In a study of diplomatic immunity among UN delegations, for example, it was found that Norwegian diplomats always obeyed the parking regulations in and around the congested streets around the UN building. This is despite the fact that, as diplomats, they could never be punished for breaking the law. As a practical matter, they couldn’t be retaliated against in any way. Even native New Yorkers, who can be punished, don’t come near that standard. You drive in New York long enough, and you’ll get a parking ticket. It’s understood. But Nigerian diplomats, who are placed under the same moral and legal restrictions as the Norwegians, are notorious for flaunting the law. They double and triple-park. They park in loading zones. They block intersections. They park on the sidewalk. Same conditions, different cultures. Norwegians respect the law, even when they can’t be held to account, and unless they take a moment to think it through they expect others to do the same. Nigerians, in general, don’t have a lot of respect for the law. At most, it’s a problem for the little people — not for an ambassador. And if you can get away with it you’d be stupid not to break the law. The same is true within these different countries as well as in front of the UN. Transnational corporations quickly learn that if they hire a local firm in Nigeria to protect their property that firm will soon start to steal from them. There will probably be less taken than if the company had left the gates unlocked (the guards don’t want to be denied a lucrative gig because they got too greedy), but the losses will begin, and they will grow. If you want to protect your property, bring in Norwegians to guard it. And rotate them back to Norway, on a regular schedule, to reduce the likelihood that the guards will eventually come to imitate the locals.

There are variations in culture, and these variations are reflected in politics. It makes sense to protect a culture that supports American politics. But what is that culture? When pressed, some defenders of American culture will find it hard to define what it is they want to protect. Some can define it, but in ways that are too excludsive. Some want to defend “Western civilization.” Some are convinced America was founded on “Judeo-Christian” values (it wasn’t) and law must be rooted in their particular interpretation of the Bible. Some on the alt-Right will go so far as to argue that to be a “real American” one has to be white, and that whites have a moral and practical obligation to keep their blood “pure,” even to the point of deporting (or building walls to block) people of color. Most won’t go that far, but they’ll will reiterate that America is a “nation-state” and a threat to the “nation” is a threat to the viability and stability of America.

They’re wrong. They are wrong for the same reason southern whites were wrong to want to limit the rights of blacks, the same reason the “know-nothings” of the nineteenth century were wrong to oppose immigration from Ireland and Italy and Germany, the conservatives of 1960 were wrong to worry that a Roman Catholic should never be elected president, or so many today still seem so shocked that a black man could be elected to that office. They are wrong for the same reason “miscegenation” was illegal in sixteen U.S. states in 1967. They are wrong for the same reason George Wallace was wrong to cry “segregation forever” in reaction to the emerging civil rights movement.

They’re wrong because a nation — particularly the United States — is not defined by genetics. A nation is intersubjective. It is the perception, by the people in it, that they share a common community, even if they will never meet most of the other members of that community. They may reach that conclusion on the basis of a common ethnic group, or language, or history. It may be a community because of a common set of principles. It is an “imagined community.”

Nations are inventions. Political scientists differ on precisely when the nation was invented. Some go as far back as the segregation of students by language in the fourteenth-century medieval university. Some push it back even a few decades earlier, to the declaration by the Scots that they were a unique people, in opposition to an invasion from England. Or perhaps it was around 1600, which has been suggested as the time of origin of “the first nation,” England.

Some nations rest their sense of a common community in a belief in a common ethnic identity. An example of an “ethnic nation” is Germany. Germans have recognized themselves as one people, even when they were divided into multiple countries. Despite the walls and armed soldiers separating East and West Germany, when the wall came down they merged with (relative) ease. They had always thought of themselves as “German,” even when divided by very different governments and economic systems. Others have a “civic nation.” France is in this category. While they do have linguistic commonalities, the thing that makes its people “French” is the perceived project of living with one another.

In 1776, the United States was not a “nation.” Not on either dimension. It had several ethnic groups, including Englishmen and Dutch and Germans and French. The colonies were working against a common foe, but they were not a single entity. After the Revolution they codified that relationship in the Articles of Confederation, which was a “league of friendship” among independent and sovereign states similar in many ways to the earliest stages of the European Communities. It didn’t work, often because of the inability of the Confederation to function as a unit in international relations. But after the creation of a Constitutional Republic, including a Bill of Rights, it made sense to say that “We the People” were “Americans.” George Washington, in his Farewell Address, reminded people that “ [t]he name of american, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”

And what are those common political principles that make us a nation? In fact the Constitution didn’t affirm many of the principles we hold today. We could not in good conscience say “we hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” and accept the ownership of some men by others. Lincoln privately rejected the positions of the “know-nothings”:

I am not a Know-Nothing — that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.” When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

But what does it mean in practice? Lincoln answered that question in his Gettysburg Address:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The people — all the people, regardless of sex or race or religion or ethnicity. It’s an ongoing project. Progress can be reversed — as it has been by Donald Trump and many of those who are enabling him. But it can also be advanced — as it was after FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech, which outlined why the US was about to engage in World War II, and which provided the framework of the best of American postwar foreign policy:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

These principles do not apply to just the people who live within the borders of the United States. But we do not have the power, or the right, to impose a particular political culture upon the rest of the world. The most we can do is provide an example, to facilitate the practice of others, and show that we can live according to these ideas.

This is what it means to be an American. It is not about our minor differences. It is our commitment to protect the rights of each of us, so long as the actions we take do not directly interfere with the rights of any of us to do the same. America is not a place, and you can’t protect it by putting a wall around it. America is not an ethnic nation, and there is no blood test to determine who belongs and who doesn’t. America is an idea. That’s what’s great about it. That’s its greatest advantage in competition against China or Japan or Germany or Russia. That’s what allows us to take the best of innovations and ideas and cultures from around the world, and make them ours. If we sacrifice that, we not only don’t deserve to survive — we’re already gone.

So who should vote? The people who want to restrict voting rights are only half right. Americans should vote: people who have demonstrated they know why this county exists and are pledged to live under the rule of law. Someone who lives by these principles is an American, regardless of their appearance or unimportant cultural differences. On the other hand, people who, for example, venerate the flag of the Confederacy — the stars and bars of a collection of traitors and slaveholders — may not in fact be American, regardless of where they were born or what they look like. People who insist America must be white have no idea of what America is, and if they insist on imposing their ideas they have no right to consider themselves American.

Note that by this standard a Spanish-speaking “illegal” immigrant may be more of an American than a Christian nationalist practicing with his militia buddies in Idaho to “cleanse” the country of those who don’t look or act like him.

But people shouldn’t be expelled for having the wrong opinions. It is only fair that everyone should be exposed to a civic education that helps people to be citizens, and everyone should have the opportunity to demonstrate they have a basic understanding of American values before they can enter a voting machine, just as they have to demonstrate they understand the traffic laws before they are allowed behind the wheel of a car. Everyone has a right to a civic education and anyone who votes should have an opportunity to demonstrate what they know by passing a citizenship exam. Anything that can be done by a Somali immigrant should be easy for an car salesman in Omaha, right?

The citizenship test is easy. Too easy, some defenders of American culture might claim. But leave that criticism aside for now. As a practical matter, what sorts of things do you need to know? Here are some questions from a recent citizenship exam. Any immigrant who wishes to be a legal citizen of the United States should be able to answer questions like these: six out of ten, selected from a set of 100 that the potential citizen is provided to study prior to the exam:

The idea of self-government is in the first three words of the Constitution. What are these words?

What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?

How many amendments does the Constitution have?

What did the Declaration of Independence do?

What are two rights in the Declaration of Independence?

What is the “rule of law”?

Name one branch or part of the government.

What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?

How many U.S. Senators are there?

Who is one of your state’s U.S. Senators now?

The House of Representatives has how many voting members?

Name your U.S. Representative.

What is the name of the Vice President of the United States now?

If both the President and the Vice President can no longer serve, who becomes President?

What are two Cabinet-level positions?

Who is the Chief Justice of the United States now?

Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the states. What is one power of the states?

What is the capital of your state?

What is the name of the Speaker of the House of Representatives now?

What are two rights of everyone living in the United States?

What are two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy?

What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?

There were 13 original states. Name three.

When was the Constitution written?

The Federalist Papers supported the passage of the U.S. Constitution. Name one of the writers.

What territory did the United States buy from France in 1803?

Name one war fought by the United States in the 1800s.

What did Susan B. Anthony do?

Who was President during World War I?

Who did the United States fight in World War II?

What did Martin Luther King, Jr. do?

Name one American Indian tribe in the United States.

Name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.

What ocean is on the West Coast of the United States?

Name one U.S. territory.

Name one state that borders Canada.

Why does the flag have 13 stripes?

Name two national U.S. holidays.

Not too hard, was it? It shouldn’t be. If there are any you don’t know now, you can look up the answers in an afternoon on Wikipedia and memorize them. Many of those questions have more than one acceptable answer. You only need one for each.

But an amazing number of Americans can’t provide answers to enough of those questions to pass the six out of ten required for a citizenship exam. A lot of people need to brush up on what they learned as kids. A lot of people have to learn it for the first time. But that’s ok. If you live in this country, you have the right to take the exam again, and again, to have the right to vote. It’s no more onerous a requirement than passing a written test to get a permit to drive.

So that’s my modest proposal: to vote in an American election you have to demonstrate that you have a basic understanding of how America works, and why.

Whadda you think?

I hope this will be the first in a series of “modest proposal” essays. on Medium. It’s not my intent to argue for one party or another, one candidate or another, one policy or another. I’m looking for general reforms of the system that will allow it to work better for everyone. I want to suggest alternatives. Some of them may require amending the Constitution, but that’s all right. The people who wrote the Constitution realized it was an imperfect document. They knew it was the product of a particular place and time, and they knew they couldn’t anticipate how it would have to change to meet the needs of the 21st century and beyond, so they left mechanisms to change it. This includes methods to change the amendment process itself. We now have more than two centuries of research in political economy. We have a better understanding of what kinds of results we can expect from various voting schemes. We can compare the American experience to the successes and failures of approaches tried around the world. We can better see what preserves liberty, and what threatens it.

Thomas Jefferson said it better than I could:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Once you identify some of the underlying issues a range of solutions can be fairly obvious. One problem is the political class — any political class — will resist changes that undermine their self-interests for the good of the whole. So, the people must take the lead to institute changes that will limit the politicians’ freedom of action, including the institutions that allow those politicians to maintain their positions. One way to do so would be to end the practice of gerymandering. Another would be to divide some of the more populous states into smaller units, to better balance against the power of the states that are large in territory but small in population. There are practical ways to reform or eliminate the electoral college. It would be a fine, and doable, project to finally ratify the first ammendment of the Bill of Rights, the real first ammendment that was proposed in the original twelve, but has since been buried in history.

But those are Modest Proposals for another time.